Yaagneshwaran Ganesh – Award-Winning Marketer & Author | Modern Marketing & Giving Value

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About The Guest

Talking Points

• 00:00 – Intro
• 04:53 – Yaagneshwaran Ganesh’s origin story.
• 07:22 – Why would you start working in marketing?
• 10:45 – Why you should start writing books.
• 15:08 – Being an operator while building a personal brand.
• 20:11 – Lessons learned from writing books.
• 25:14 – Lessons learned from starting a podcast.
• 30:05 – How to always give out immense value.
• 34:53 – How to find more listeners for your podcast.
• 41:15 – What is conversational intelligence?
• 47:30 – Yaagneshwaran Ganesh’s involvement in Avoma.
• 50:55 – Using conversational intelligence.
• 56:29 – The best strategy to market a product.
• 1:03:08 – How to connect with Yaagneshwaran Ganesh.
• 1:04:57 – Yaagneshwaran Ganesh’s biggest challenges.
• 1:07:57 – Yaagneshwaran Ganesh’s mentor.
• 1:08:50 – Yaagneshwaran Ganesh’s book or podcast recommendation.
• 1:09:16 – Yaagneshwaran Ganesh’s advice to his 20-year-old self.
• 1:09:30 – What does success mean to Yaagneshwaran Ganesh?

Show Links

• https://twitter.com/Yaagneshwaran/
• https://wwwyaagneshwaran.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaagneshwarang/

Podcast & Newsletter Sponsors

• HUBSPOT – http://hubspot.com/successpod/

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What is the Success Story Podcast?

On this podcast, you’ll find interviews, Q&A, keynote presentations & conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

The podcast is hosted by entrepreneur, business executive, author, educator & speaker, Scott D. Clary.

Scott will discuss some of the lessons he’s learned over his own career, as well as have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, notable figures, and politicians. All who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and insights.

He sits down with leaders and mentors and unpacks their stories to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between.

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Machine Generated Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, marketing, podcast, marketer, books, spoke, conversation, product, writing, person, conversational intelligence, reached, customer, topics, realized, episodes, company, tool, meeting, thought

SPEAKERS

Scott D Clary, Yaagneshwaran Ganesh

 

Scott D Clary  00:00

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I’m your host Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the blue wire podcast network as well as the HubSpot Podcast Network. Now, the HubSpot Podcast Network has incredible shows like The Hustle daily. It’s hosted by Zachary Crockett Jacob Cohen, Rob literalist, and Juliette Bennett RYLA. Now the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat and informative takes on business, tech and news. And it happens daily. So if you want to stay up to date on the latest and greatest, and some of these topics are interesting to you, then you’re going to love the hustle daily topics like Amazon’s grocery strategy. The rise of the ugly shoe economy is AI the secret to love and America’s sleep deficit problem. So if these are topics you want to get into and you love hearing up to date content whenever you wake up in the morning, go listen to the hustle daily wherever you listen to your podcast. today. My guest is Yag ganache. He is an award winning marketer, author podcaster and TEDx speaker. He is recognized by the world marketing Congress as one of the marketing Mavericks in association with the World Federation of marketing professionals. He is the Director of Marketing at VO ma he works with early stage companies, helping them build their narrative and crafting their category through the Google for startups initiative called the Startup Weekend. He is amongst the top 100 global Mar tech influencers. He’s also a best selling author of eight books. He is the host of the ABM conversations podcast that podcast is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and features some of the most notable names in marketing such as Seth Godin Guy Kawasaki, Rand Fishkin, and many more. He speaks internationally at business forums such as TEDx performance marketing Moscow, Chamber of Commerce, Netherlands, the world marketing Congress, to name a few, as well as academic institutions such as the IITs saxion, University of Applied Sciences and many more. We spoke about his origin story, how he started writing books that was sort of the initial version of his personal brand. Of course, he’s written eight books now. So he started writing books. He put out a podcast, we spoke about his experience starting and building everything that he’s done in his career. So we spoke about some lessons that he’s learned writing books, how to write the best books and lessons that he you know, he would impart on somebody who wants to write their first book. Also, he had Seth Godin on his podcast. Notable author Seth Godin has written a ton of books. So some lessons that he learned from Seth Godin on writing as well. Then we pivoted, we spoke about podcasts, how he started his podcast, how he grew it into an audible podcast, how he was able to attract some of the incredible names like Seth Godin, like Guy Kawasaki, like Rand Fishkin onto his show. Also, his research process, he has a very intricate and detailed research process, so that he pulls out the best content from his guests when they do get on the show. So he’s gonna walk through his research process. It’s an extensive research process that he does before every single podcast recording. And lastly, we spoke about a BOMA. Now vamos a company, where he’s the Director of Marketing, he’s building it from the ground up, he was the first marketer of OMA as a conversation intelligence tool. We’re going to speak about conversation intelligence, why it’s important, why it helps you create an automatic feedback loop that can help your sales team, your marketing team, your product team, literally your entire company, get real time or asynchronous, rather feedback from your customer without needing to get it in real time on a call. So how do we use AI? How do we use tools technology to get that feedback loop that feedback mechanism that can make every component of the business work better and, and be more optimized and efficient? We need that feedback tool. That’s what a Vollmer does through conversation intelligence. And he’s going to walk through why conversation intelligence is one of the Future Tools of marketing, we have to be able to use it, but also how to differentiate yourself as you take a new product to market because when he took a BOMA to market when he was a first marketing hire, this is still blue ocean, this is not something that is the norm in every organization. So some strategies to make some noise and to secure your first customers when you are selling a blue ocean product. So we have some book writing lessons. We have some podcast. We have some podcast lessons. We have some conversation intelligence and digital marketing lessons. So yeah, going into everything. Let’s go right into it. This is Yaag, Ganesh. He is Director of Marketing at Oma. He is a speaker. He’s a writer. He is a podcaster he’s done it all. Let’s go

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  04:53

So, first of all, thank you so much, Scott. You know, it’s it’s great to share my story here because when I I look back at some of the things that I’ve done. You know, a lot of things have happened purely because of serendipity. Now, when I look back, and if I have to tell one thing as to how things happen in my life, it has been a series of eliminations, I’ve tried out things, and I failed it. So many things are faded so many things, tried new things, and finally landed on things that works for me, to give you an example, I was in my later half of my school, and everybody typically in India are like, hey, get into engineering, get into engineering. And I was not interested in that. And I told my parents very clearly that hate, don’t waste money there. And even if I’m going to invest myself, I’m not going to waste money there. Because at the end of four years, if I’m not going to build a career in something that I’m interested, I’m going to terribly fail. And I realized this during my school days, because, you know, I took up computer science, and I took a math and it troubled me, you know, literally troubled me, I realized that this is not where I want to be. And so I finally got into computer science, I did my bachelor’s in computer science for three years. And at towards the end of my third year, I realized that I’m not going to build a career in coding. Because if anything, you know, I’m not able to think and write a program of my own, I’d probably memorize a few things and do a few things, write it, but if it’s not going to be, if I’m not understanding that, that’s not coming out, then that’s not where my credit needs to be. And then I figured out what do I do? And funny, though, I consider myself an introvert. I like to get to know people, I like to talk to people. And, you know, I like to build relationships. And so I thought, hey, let me try my hands had management, you know, who knows, and took up some courses and then gave my, you know, get my mat, which is your equal into the entrance exam here for your MBA, and luck would have it, I had a very decent score, and got into a good business school. And, again, I did not have an idea, what should I specialize in? And then, at the end of my first year, I was an intern at an, you know, at a insurance company, and I was walking through the remote parts of the country like 15 kilometers a day. And in the scorching heat of that part of the country, and

 

Scott D Clary  07:26

due to do like a to do, like insurance, like you’re meeting the clients, or why were you what you’re doing, adjusting or what?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  07:36

Yeah, so my job, Dan was to, you know, appoint insurance agents who would buy the company, so I had to go and identify the people in those regions, who were very influential people. This was back in, you know, 2007. And influencer marketing was not a thing.

 

Scott D Clary  07:55

That was recruiting salespeople. Yeah. People. Yeah,

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  07:59

yeah. According to, I’ll tell you the story of how I used to go and find people. You know, in the remotest parts of the country. I used to find a small tea shop on the roadside. And I used to go get a cup of tea for myself, sit down and quietly sip my tea and watch what people are talking. And from that I could get some names as to who are the postmaster is in that area? Who are the school headmaster’s in that area? Because if I directly go and ask who is the headmaster, people view me, as, you know, staring look like who is this guy? Why is this guy coming in and asking, you know, he’s an unknown person in this village. So I used to get the names. And while I was paying my bills at the store, I used to suddenly ask the name of the person who said, Hey, I have come here to visit this particular person, how do I get to this place, and then people who tell me, and then I used to go meet and convince them and, you know, finally, they used to become advisors for that particular insurance company. So that was the process. Then going back to the college again, I realized that, hey, this is one I can get to know people. And maybe you know, I should specialize in marketing. And things started. And I first got my

 

Scott D Clary  09:02

candidate, again, he just pivoted again, you’re like, let me go into management, then you go in, let me go into marketing. And you just like, I see what you’re saying when you first when you first started, like elimination.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  09:11

Exactly. And then it started and, you know, when I came in, and at the end of my MBA, I got a job in a logistics company in Dubai. And as again, my bad luck would have it. It was peak recession in 2008. Before even I could join the company, my job was called off and I didn’t know what to do. Right. And then I started my own marketing agency. I thought, Okay, I’m young. You know, let me try whatever I can, you know, so I started my agency ran it for about two years, did all possible mistakes that one could, you know, I did not know the difference between CapEx and OpEx. And I still had venture, you know, partnerships jayvees with companies In Luxembourg, Belgium, and got screwed over by a lot of clients who didn’t pay on time who never paid did not left. And after two years, I thought, you know, let me get back to full time role at that point. You know, I was also about to get married, so I needed a stable pay. And that happened I joined a company called SolarWinds, based out of Texas, you know, I was working remote. And back from the day, I was like, you know, remote work is not new to me. So I’ve been constantly to remote work from that time. And then I started writing books, I One fine day, I thought, hey, you know, I used to read a lot of books. And my first book was actually a fiction book, you know, it was a book called taken already, which was a romantic thriller. And really, yeah,

 

Scott D Clary  10:43

exactly. But okay, so let me just clarify. So when you started writing books, like this is, like, when I look at when I look at Yag, like, right now you have like a strong personal brand, you have your own website, you, you’ve you, and you’ve done all these things that seem like personal branding items. And I don’t mean to turn this into like a personal brand chat, but you didn’t actually go into writing books on purpose to augment your your, you know, to sell yourself as this marketing guru. This is not the goal. Absolutely. Passion.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  11:10

Absolutely not. In fact, I have my own gripe about personal marketing, I mean, personal branding, a lot of people, the things that they do in the name of personal branding is a bit annoying. It’s not even, you know, personal branding to say, so yeah, going back to the part I did my, you know, I wrote my first book. And to my surprise, they were about 800 to 900 people who actually paid and bought that book. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then, in the meantime, I also wanted to start speaking in the public. So I went to my business school, I asked my professor, that I would like to do a guest session, and they were gracious enough. And they said, Hey, give it a try. And, you know, it happened. And from there on, I quickly realized that talking to this audience was not my core, because, you know, people are still studying, and I was more talking about things at work, and how you could do certain things, you know, the mistakes that I learned from and all of that, so I thought I need to pivot to a business audience. And the moment I started getting invited to speaking at different conferences, and all of that, my publisher gave me a call, he was like, hey, Yogge, if you’re going to write fiction books, again, I’m going to charge you double. But on the contrary, if you write a marketing book, I’ll publish you for free. And I was like, This is amazing. But, you know, then I was like, I can’t even do this, because I don’t consider myself an expert. Can I write books, and he was like, just go give it a try. Your first book is going to be bad. But by the time you figure figure things out, you will be amazing. I gave it a shot. My first marketing book was called is your marketing in sync or sinking? You know, because that was

 

Scott D Clary  12:47

the title. It’s not a bad title.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  12:51

And there was also the dilemma that I was in. And from there, I consistently started writing marketing books, you know, I, my career started becoming more focused towards marketing stuff, virus, working only specifically for Martic products. And then slowly and steadily, things fell in place. And at some point, I started a LinkedIn show called Coffee conversations. It was a five minute LinkedIn show that I posted every morning. And it took off and then a lot of people came back to me and they said, Hey, you should, you know, do a little more detailed version of this, maybe start a podcast. And in 2019, December, I started the podcast, I had no clue what is a dynamic mic? What is a condenser mic? You know, what is what? I just had a topic in my mind, I went to a nearby studio. And I thought, let’s record this first episode. And then to look back now having, having middle coming to think that I’ve done about 115 episodes now. And I’ve had people like say, Gordon, Guy Kawasaki, David cancer, Rand Fishkin, you name it all the stalwarts of marketing have been on the show. It’s so humbling, and so rewarding. But the fun part is not even one day, I tried to reach out to these people thinking that, hey, if I have these guys, I’ll get more downloads or more lessons, that was never the thought process. Because after every episode, you know, people used to come back and give me a very detailed DM on my LinkedIn. And it would be like Yogge, I completely disagree with what this person said, Because of this, this this or I completely agree with this. And they used to write such detailed posts. And I realize people are so invested in this, you know, they are coming back and

 

Scott D Clary  14:31

nothing positive or negative. They’re invested.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  14:34

Yeah, yeah,exactly. You know, they’re giving us so much of time. And which means whatever I do, I made sure that any guests that I bring in, it needs to make sure that I’m giving value to these people who trust me, you know, I need to focus on a single topic and go as deep as possible, because they come in for the promise of the topic and if I don’t deliver on that, it’s on me. So I started to look out and reach out to people based on specific topics. In that virtue, all these things happened. And today, you know, the show was part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. So very happy about that as well.

 

Scott D Clary  15:08

So it’s done. Okay, it’s gone. It’s gone in the right direction. You didn’t you didn’t, you didn’t eliminate this one. It’s, it’s gone. Well. So Tom, so let’s let’s, so that’s sort of that’s sort of your, your personal brand. And I, again, I apologize for using the word. That’s your that’s your that’s what you’ve created on. That’s what Yeah, it’s created the books, the podcast, now you speak globally, I know you did like a TED talk as well. Now, walk me through, like, when you when you do these things? Why did you not double down on the personal brand, so that you could just monetize that and and, and that could be your full time thing? Because you still work? Like you still, you still you still act as a as a marketing executive within organizations? And I asked this because I love understanding your perspective on this because I do I do the same thing. So why did why did you choose to still be an operator in a company? How do you balance that? What’s the time management because I want people to look at you. And I want people to say, okay, so he is still do and I want you to talk about what you’re actually doing for your work. But he’s still doing this. What’s my excuse for not starting this thing that is, you know, by most definition successful, the book, the speaking the podcast, while still being an operator in a company. So how do you manage this? And also, what do you what do you do?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  16:32

Right? So see, first of all, the reason why I have not singularly focused on becoming personal brand, or, you know, monetizing all of these things. Yeah, monetization can happen. In some ways on the side, like, say, for example, the books do pay me and, you know, occasionally, I also get sponsors for the podcast show. And, you know, that also pays me. But ultimately, the way I look at it is, I don’t look at myself as a personal brand. You know, at the end of the day, when people ask me, Are you a professional speaker, I say no, you know, because I am a marketer, and my skills, primarily our marketing, and that skill comes purely from the things that I do in my full time job. And some of the things that I do, as part of my, say, personal projects, which can be my book, which can be my podcast, or the speaking and all of that, you know, there are learnings from this, which I can take to my full time work and draw learnings from that I can bring into this. So that exchange or what I do on the side here is more for me as my ground for experimentation. There are certain times where you have your own things and, and the scope for experimenting, a lot is high here. And there is also room for making a lot of mistakes, there is always this balance between making mistakes and making blunders. So here, you can give it a shot. If something goes terribly wrong here, that’s still fine, but you can go and give it a try. So that is what I do. And what I do right now full time is I work for a company called Houma, which is based out of you know, California right now, we are pretty much distributed all around the world, the team here, so, the company is into conversation intelligence, I work as the director of marketing for the company, I started out in April 2021. And I started out as one person marketing team and from there pretty much did everything from content to product marketing to performance to brand and pretty much everything and then we got one person in performance marketing full time, now we have one more who is joining content. So the team is consistently growing right now, we are also in a space where in December, we raised our Series A and we are on a super growth path, which means it also requires a lot of my attention and a lot of my time, because in this phase, you know you require to contribute a lot. But because you have some sort of, you know, base in the form of your book or in the phone via podcast, he also contributes to your work. To give you an example, you know, I when I started the company, when I started out of this job, what happened was the name of OMA for this company right you know, the search volume for the brand name aroma was somewhere between zero to 10. And now, when I look at almost a year after that, it is close to 2000. So, you see that the search volume of this brand alone as an example, if I can give you that as a metric, it has increased a lot purely either because some of us are more active on LinkedIn, we start talking about in the previous videos, and somewhere you know, if you have connections and people trust you, they also look into what this guy is working you know, what is the brand that this person is working for. And if they go and try it out, if they like it, they refer to more people and that increases so everything contributes to each other. But at the end of the day, I understand that my core is marketing, I want to be known primarily as a marketer, and that is what puts food on my table to be honest. And everything is everything that I do apart from that is an evolution from the base. What I call this work, you know, this, this is primary for me. And the experience from my work goes into the books into my podcast and all the other things.

 

Scott D Clary  20:10

Alright, that makes sense. I want to pull a few things out of this, because I think there’s a few different directions we could take it. So there’s like book writing lessons, there’s podcast lessons. And then there’s also like, just conversational intelligence, which is like a very smart, tactical, forward thinking, marketing discussion. But first, I am curious about a few things is how I’m gonna structure it. So I’m going to do, I’m going to do book lessons, featuring one of your podcast guests, cuz I’m pretty sure you had an interesting conversation with him. And then we can go into like podcast lessons and why what I’m talking about is, you wrote, how many books total, eight books total. And then you spoke to Seth Godin, who’s like, he’s written an incredible amount of marketing books. So first of all, what have you learned personally, from writing books? And then what was the most important thing that you took from a conversation with Seth Gordon, that you’re going to start using for maybe your framework or your process for writing?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  21:08

Right? So first question, what did I learn from my writing books is that, you know, most people think writing a book is a difficult thing. Actually, it is not, you know, you can. And if you look at my style of working, I am not a very structural person, if you if you think about it, my first book I just randomly started writing, I did not even think that I’m going to publish it. Yes, there was a coordinate of me that told me that, hey, I want to publish this book. And that’s why I kept writing on a daily basis. But I was still, you know, rambling on my laptop. And at some point, I realized that he there are about 150 pages. Now. Let me go back and read how it feels. And I shared the copy with my wife, and I said, Hey, take a read and tell me what you feel. And she was like, Yeah, you should go ahead and publish it. And so I went about it. And my biggest takeaway, I would say is that after eight books, now, I would say, it’s important to think about what is that singular value that you want to communicate through your book, it could be a story, or it could be a framework, or it could be, you know, something that people can take away. And one thing that I’ve done with my books is I’ve kept most of my books very short. Because as I told you, even from my podcast, and everything, you know, a lot of things that I do also come from my frustration of experiencing those things. And I want to do the opposite of that. So for example, when I read books, you know, if I read 20 pages, and if I feel that the next 200 pages is going to be saying the same thing with different examples, I’m not going to read any further. So I wanted to make sure that I keep things crisp, and I don’t repeat too much. But at the same time, it’s not like I just said, once you make it so actionable, you make it so clear that people can take that framework and use it for their work. And then from there, you can expand that into, say, some podcast talk. So you can extend it to your speaking or you can expand it, expand that into your training programs, or all of that, then that works. And from there, going back to said, God, and you know, again, there is I’m so happy to talk about this, because at the outset, it looks like you had said Gordon on the show. But the secret or the reality of all of this is that the very first time I reached out to Seth Gordon for something was made back in 2009. And I kept reaching out to him for one thing or the other. And finally, I got him on the show in 2021. So, you know, it was been a, it has been a persistence of 11 years.

 

Scott D Clary  23:42

11 years, but he’s He’s a popular, he’s a popular marketer. He’s a good, dude.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  23:46

Yeah. And, you know, if I have to take one thing from said, you know, as you asked, more than anything about his writing, as a person, he’s a wonderful, wonderful human being. And, you know, the reason why I have so much respect is, I’ve reached out to so many people, and pretty much everyone that I’ve reached out to have virtual assistants assistants, you know, you never talk to them directly. And they are the ones who are working. But in sets case, you know, being who he is, he will reply to every single email that he gets, he might say, No, that’s fine. It might be a one or two liner. But he politely say that, and he will be the person who’s responding. And that to me, you know, I was like, This is how I need to be, you know, where were you go in your life, you need to be grounded. And all of his examples, all of his stories come from real life. You know, every single thing that he says is from first principles. When you hear him talk about something, there is no one jargon that you would hear that sentence. If it’s a third grader who’s listening to what he’s saying, we’ll still get it. If it’s a granny. Still she is going to get it. So that simplicity is something that I would like to take away from that conversation.

 

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Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  26:07

do not implemented in everything that I do.

 

Scott D Clary  26:10

Very smart. Okay. So let’s talk about very, very good, good. And Seth Godin just seems like a very kind and smart individual. So I appreciate that, too. So let’s talk about let’s talk about the podcast, and let’s talk about you jumping into this, you jumped into a lot of things. And I think that it seems like everybody is trying to start a podcast because it’s, in my opinion. And I think a lot of people believe that it’s a great way to build an audience to communicate a message, especially more complicated messages that it’s harder to just capture, in short form content podcasts give you that format that allow you to have really candid, honest, you know, discussions about very complex topics like business and whatnot. So I’m always you know, I’m all personally I’m always evangelizing that you should be starting a podcast for your business, the great content marketing tool, you can definitely start a podcast for yourself. And it seems like more and more people are, are getting on board. So what are some what are some lessons that you’ve learned, as you started your show, as you’ve grown it, obviously now successfully, and it can be in terms of marketing it growing the actual audience, all the way through to maybe getting guests you mentioned, you tried to get Seth Godin on your show for 11 years? How did you finally land him?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  27:25

Right, so about the podcast, you know, as I told you, the podcast started out of my frustration, because, you know, when I listen to a show, if I don’t get value out of it, you know, after, again, value is one word that is so commonly used, and so commonly also misused. Everybody says, deliver value, but nobody tells you what actually value is. Right? So to me, anybody listening to the show, what I mean by value here is that somebody gives you 45 minutes to one hour of their time. And if you don’t deliver something that is useful to them, that is like say, in my audience, I very clearly see that. These are SAS marketers, and sales people with at least seven plus years of experience from around the world. And more than 50% of my listeners actually come from the US. And if that’s the case, you know, I need to make sure that when I’m talking about a particular topic, I need to speak in that flavor. You know, I cannot talk about what is content marketing, for example, but instead, I can talk about, hey, if you’re doing content marketing, distribution is one of the biggest problems that a lot of people don’t get. So how do you do distribution? Now, there are always going to be some topics where you might have some expertise that you can talk about. And then there are going to be other topics where you’re not the expert in but you can go and reach out to the best person who can speak about that particular topic. In this case of content distribution, I reached out to Ross Simons and I was like, Ross, you know, I think you’re the best person to talk about this. Can you come on the show? And he was gracious enough to say yes. And then this is your opportunity, wherein instead of going in and winging it, you go in prepared with the mindset that, hey, these are the questions that you want him to answer. Again, the beauty is that it’s not like I ask a question, wait for an answer, ask the next question. It needs to be a conversation. But at the same time, it needs to be focused in such a manner that somebody who’s listening to it should not be like it’s going in all directions. At the end of that 45 minutes, they need to have a blueprint as to how they can go about distributing their content. So that is what, you know, I structured and that’s what I focused on. And starting from the first episode to the 50th episode, it’s obviously there’s a lot of difference. It doesn’t sound the same, you know, there have been improvements in terms of the quality of mic that I’ve used or the way I’ve improved myself as as a speaker, and in the way I’ve prepared also right. So you there are going to be situations where over a period of time you become a better host you you pick up these moments as to how to react in certain moments and have that good conversation. And then I introduced something called Rapid Fire, which came in probably around the 13th or 14th episode. It was not there from the very beginning. And all of these things happen. And going back to the question about set, how I landed again, you know, it’s about probably persistence. And it was a simple email what happened was, or I by then I think I probably had about 60 or 70 episodes, or probably even 80 episodes done, I guess. So I reached out to them. I, it was a simple email where I said, say that I think I’ve traveled you so many times, let this be one more email from me. But, you know, I’m reaching out to you this time for inviting you to be a guest on my show. I’ve already had people like, Guy Kawasaki, David cancel, and I gave him three or four names that he might recognize. And then I said, if there is one thing that is lacking on my show, is your presence and OD like to be on the show. And you know, in the next five minutes, I got a reply. He said, Here’s my calendar. I was like, wow. So that’s good.

 

Scott D Clary  31:04

That’s what you built. So you built the base, you built the base, and then persistence, and then a little bit of social proof, like, sort of peppered onto that. And that’s what got it done. Okay, good. And also question on on your, your, cuz you mentioned, you go very deep with guests to pull up the most amount of value possible, which I think is very smart, especially, especially for something where you’re trying to teach something over in in a show. So how do you how do you do your research? What’s your research process? How do you structure your questions, so that you know, because perhaps you’re not the expert in that particular topic? So how do you make sure that you pull out the best possible information from those guests so that it’s actually valuable?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  31:43

That’s a brilliant question. You know, the way it happens is, again, the difference between a good podcast episode and a bad podcast episode is purely on the host. That’s what I believe, because it’s about the questions that you ask. Because when somebody comes in, guess there are also going to be somebody who are going to answer answer you in a tweet format, maybe one or two lines, and then there are also going to be people who are going to give you a half an hour answer for a single question, you need to have the balance. But at the same time, the beauty is that you bring in your curiosity, you know, when you do new things, you’re naturally going to have a lot of questions, now, how to do something, and then you also do some research about this particular person, I generally take at least two days to go back and do my research about a particular person, I at least listen to 10 of their episodes, you know, wherever they have spoken. And, yeah,

 

Scott D Clary  32:37

God, you’re putting in a lot of time, good for you Good for you, you’re a better podcaster than me, I try and do

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  32:45

1. Again, it’s not like I sit down and listen, what I do is, you know, every time I’m going on a jog, I am listening to some of these shows. And so that gives me insights, the idea is not to ask the same set of questions that they have been asked in 10 different shows, and at the same time, you know, stick to the topic, but when you hear some of these episodes, you get an insight into what these guys have gone through, you know, some of their case studies or, you know, something that they touch upon, and you can pick up something from that. So, when I’m running, I hear something, and I was like, this is interesting, I just stopped, make a note right there. And then, you know, continued running, so come back a look at it and implement that. Now. That is one part. Second, I go and look at whatever they have written. What are the different places that are being spoken? Or what what are they accomplished? And is there something that is interesting to what I’m trying to get through this podcast? You know, it’s, it’s about distribution of content I’m looking at, does this person have a framework? Or, you know, I’m looking at, okay, well, how has this person distributed their content? And what are they doing? So when you look at those things, you get a set of things that you want to learn. And because you are not the best person at that, it makes you all the more curious and wanting to learn. And when you show that energy, you show that curiosity, you know, that also gets the other person going, because it’s a very honest conversation. And when I think about it, here’s the here’s the mindset that I go in with, say, for example, be it a safe garden, or Rand Fishkin, or Guy Kawasaki. Now, I cannot hire these people for an R, to coach me on something that is super expensive, unthinkable. But on the contrary, when they’ve given you one hour of their time, you know, the one way that you can show them, the respect that you have for them is by going in prepared and asking the right questions, and showing them that you value their time. And by doing that, you also get good answers, and you can translate that value to the listeners. So that’s the sequence that I think about.

 

Scott D Clary  34:46

I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today’s episode, HubSpot. Now, the new year might have you thinking ahead to what you want out of your career. So when you think about your success story, what do you actually picture is it retiring early with a beauty view of the skyline? Is it leaving a legacy with your name on it? Or maybe it’s helping influence and change some of the world’s most pressing issues? Whatever it is writing your success story starts by working smart because when you work smart your success story writes itself. A HubSpot CRM platform helps your marketing campaigns work harder and smarter. With intuitive visual workflows and bot builders. You can create scalable, automated campaigns across email, social media, web and chat so your customers hear your messages loud and clear. Are you tired of your content not adapting to mobile, making it difficult for your customers to absorb your message a HubSpot CRM platform optimizes your content for multiple devices so that you can reach your customers, wherever they are, which is just smart. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot crm@hubspot.com Amazing. Now, one thing, I had a question I just slipped my mind actually, what was I gonna say? I was gonna say, Oh, one thing that you brought up repeatedly, I thought was very interesting as well as it’s turning into like more of like a podcasting masterclass episode, but that’s fine. I think it’s useful. You You always highlight exactly who your listener is. Yeah. And I feel like that is something that’s coming from your marketing brain because you’ve figured out your you know, your buyer personas and your ideal customer profiles and all your avatars and whatnot. That’s a very marketing, that’s a very analytical way to approach when you’re selling a product. But speak to me about your process for for that watch. So for somebody who maybe is not coming from Marketing, and they do want to start a podcast, why did you do that? How did you define who it is? How did you really figure out who’s your who your listener is? And what is the importance of that?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  36:43

Great. So all of these things happen on its own? You know, I cannot take credit that from day one, I decided this, because when I started out, as I told you, it started from coffee conversations, which was a five minute video to this. So people asked for it, you know, people who were following me on LinkedIn, they were like, Hey, why don’t you start a specific show where you can go deeper? And then I asked them, What topic do you think I should speak about? And they were like, Let’s, you know, talk about ABM. And the first few episodes were very specifically focused on ABM. And obviously, when you’re talking about ABM, then the listeners are going to be slightly senior marketers. Because, you know, naturally ABM is something that salespeople and marketers with some years of experience have implemented predominantly at mid market and enterprise kind of companies. And then slowly, what happened was over a period of time, I started getting more of SAS SMB listeners. And they came back, as I told you, they used to reach out to me on LinkedIn and DM me about what topics that they would like to, you know, listen about, or, you know, hey, can you talk specifically about the mahr tech landscape? Or can you talk specifically about, you know, go to market strategy, so on and so forth. And then I used to go and figure out who’s the best person who can, who I can reach out to who can go deep on this, like, say, when I went to David cancel, it was about how to, you know how to build a product company, from scratch in a way where, because, you know, one thing that drift did beautifully. Once that intercom was already into existence for quite some time, they were already a unicorn by the time trust came in, but still, you know, they took a different path and built a category for themselves. So I had that story that I could request DC to come and speak about. So when I had topics like this, then slowly I started seeing a pattern I used. I used to call charitable, where, you know, I can go back and see what is the age group of people that listen to my show. And, you know, what, what are the industries that these people come from? And once I look at this data, and also start marrying with people that spread my show, on LinkedIn, to their particular groups and communities, slowly, I started figuring out that, hey, let me not worry about whether I’m getting 1000 downloads, 10,000 downloads and whatnot, because that is not what I optimize for. I was looking at, hey, the 10 or 20 people who are, you know, taking by show to their community? Do I give them the kind of episodes that they will be happy to, you know, wear on their sleeves and take it to other people? Sometimes, you know, as an experiment, I tried something, you know, about six months back, I created a t shirt called Rapid Fire, which was part of my show, as you as you were there the last time Yes, and it is it said rapid fire section. And it Welcome to rapid fire section or something like that. And in the corner, there was one atm conversations podcast and I put it out on LinkedIn saying that I’m trying to merchandise and I was surprised that actually, you know, 15 or 20 people actually bought it.

 

Scott D Clary  39:53

And really then a good community, right?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  39:57

Yeah. And the next day I was surprised that these people posted these on LinkedIn, like people were posting these pictures doing like this. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And slowly and steadily, I realized that yeah, there are people who are very serious about it. And I don’t mind the numbers. I never even one day optimized for the number of downloads. And even today, I don’t optimize for the numbers. If it happens, it happens. But at the end of the day, I want people to stick to the show because they like the content. And it can go from there. So yeah, if you asked me, How did I grow? That is one area that I still struggle. Yeah, I am probably still figuring out ways to grow it. Yes, we do have about 30,000 or 35,000 downloads per month right now. But it has been, you know, it is kind of reaching some sort of stagnancy if I could say, but yeah, growth is not still my expertise about podcasts. I’m still figuring that out.

 

Scott D Clary  40:50

But you are so but I actually believe I actually believe that what you’re doing well, will lead to growth in the long term, but it’ll be a much healthier community than somebody that just sort of tries to get growth at all costs. And and I think that that’s probably something that will probably benefit you. And, and candidly, the community that you’ve built, like the the business opportunity that comes out of a community that has been built around a hyper targeted, very specific message, which is your podcast is an incredible asset. That’s something that depends on how you want to monetize in the future, right, but you just even found out with merch, that people are responsive to buying new T shirts. And that’s like, that’s not bad. That’s not bad at all. Okay, so that’s, that’s sort of just some lessons. And I think that’s a smart, that’s a smart lesson for somebody who wants to start a show, because I do believe that the way that you’re doing it is the way that it should be done. And I think that that’s more like you’re optimizing for that long term success versus short term gain where you’re just all over. And I actually, you know, candidly, I didn’t, I wasn’t as smart about starting my show as you. And that’s something that I don’t regret, because everything is a learning experience. But I do wish at some points, I had hyper targeted or sort of had found my focus earlier on. So

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  42:02

I pleased that you said about the long term thing, right, so I’m a big fan of navall, Ravi Kant. And, you know, he often talks about play long term games with long term people. So that is something that is drilled into my head, I tried to do that every single time.

 

Scott D Clary  42:14

He says he’s a smart man, he’s a very smart man. So that’s a good thing. I think that’s a good, that’s a very good quote. It’s a very good life lesson. So let’s talk about so let’s talk about what you’re working in and on now. Because I also think that’s very interesting. And it is a my audience is also very business focused audience. So you’ve marketed across various you’ve participated in and executed on in various types of marketing, but right now you’re in in conversational intelligence. Agents. Yeah. So explain, explain what that is. Where does this fit in a digital marketers playbook? What is it used for? What is it not used for? I’d love to because I’ve never actually I don’t think I’ve had anybody on the show. That works in conversational intelligence. So this is, this is another good topic. Okay. So let’s go

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  43:02

salutely Absolutely. So conversation intelligence, as such, you know, it’s a, it’s, it’s a domain that has grown over the last five years or so. And, you know, you might have heard of players like Gong and chorus and all these people into the space. So, so here’s, here’s the beauty of this space, you know, there are multiple ways to look at it. So if you look at a company like Gong and chorus, what they do, or what they look at, is they look at conversation intelligence, from the perspective of sales. So it’s predominantly helping sales people. And it’s useful for say, you know, coaching their sales reps, or, like, say, a typical VP of sales would listen to the calls of a rep, and they’ll probably help them improve in certain areas, or, you know, they can also listen to the calls of other peer reps and learn, you know, how they’re handling the objections and how they could do better and all of that. Now, the way we at Omar look at it is, we look at this from a horizontal perspective, we think that conversation intelligence, per se, is the art of actually, you can you can look at it from a horizontal manner, and identify that pretty much any function within an organization could see value from that. So let me give you a few examples. Let’s say I, as a marketer, you know, like I listen to a podcast, if I’m listening to the conversation between my a and a prospect, or say, between a customer and my customer success or support executive, and from that conversation, you know, I can understand the kinds of questions that these people are asking. And then the content that I create can come from truly understanding what my customer wants and what they are looking for, rather than deriving my topics out of thin air, or just because you know, a particular keyword has a lot of search volume. This actually makes more sense. Or let’s say for example, I look into a dashboard and I realized that hey, you know, these are Are the two competitors that my customers compare me the most with. So when I start preparing my battle card, you know, I can start with those two, instead of saying that, hey, I compete with the best in the industry. And these are my competitors, no, you really hear who your customers are comparing with. And that is where it actually comes from. Similarly for, say, a product manager, the way they can use this is, they can look at these, some of these conversations and dashboards and realize that, Hey, these are the five features that the customers have been consistently asking for. So let me prioritize those things on my roadmap, you know, and similarly, some, you know, there is the other aspect, the other use case, where I can do is I can, let’s say, I’m talking to you right now. And let’s say if this is a, this is a sales call, and I want to say that, hey, you know, Scott compared me with these three companies. And then these are the four pain points that he is trying to solve for. And then these are, say, the things that he liked about my product. Now, if I start taking notes, while talking to you, there are going to be those awkward pauses, and I’m not probably 100% actively listening to you. And there are those brakes instead, if a conversation intelligence tool can automate this process completely, right. So if it’s going to take notes on my behalf, and also going to the CRM and updating it, which the salespeople hate to do, you know, if that happens, yeah, that’s magic. And so, when I first reached out to my CEO, you know, this was not one of those jobs where I, you know, I was reaching out to her I apply to i, there was no real opening for marketing director at OMAP. And I reached out, I first tried out the product, I loved it, and have been observing this company from the outside for almost a year. Because, you know, when look at my entire career, you can divide it into two parts, companies where I went in, I was given a product, and I was asked to market that, versus this phase where I reached out to somebody because I was truly passionate about this product. And the problem that this company is solving for, which is very different from others in the industry has a unique approach, unique POV. And I have this thing in my head that when you have a unique point of view, you name it, frame it and claim it. You know, once you start doing that, you’re like, Okay, this is the person I need to talk to. And I went in, and I said, Aditya, I like this product. And I see that you don’t have a marketer on your team. You know, I would like to wear this on my sleeves and do it everyday. Because this is something that I truly, truly believe is a serious problem to solve for. And then but I asked him, Can you give me a demo of the product. And he took me through a demo. And I was sold, I was like, Well, this is where I need to be. This was probably like, you know, Steve Jobs telling the CEO of coke, that we want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life. It was that kind of a moment. And I wanted to be there. And from there on, you know, because when you look at it as a when you’re purely passionate about that particular product, or the problem that you’re solving for you sleep drink breeds, you know, think about it all the time. And that is what is happening here. And then I realized that we are not trying to be somebody else, we have a unique wise we are doing this and this is how we are solving for it. And over a period of time. I got excited about it. You know, even today, right now I’m wearing this Oh, my T shirt.

 

Scott D Clary  48:37

I know you’re I know. So it’s it’s like this is what you want to work with. This is this is what people should be like the whole story of how you got involved with the BOMA. Like, that’s how people should be looking at their career in their job. Like I love that, like you track this company’s process progress and you’re like, I’m working for you, I’m going to figure out how to blow this up and make sure that everybody knows about Obama.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  48:56

And at the same time was very candid when I spoke to him, I said that, here that there are certain areas, which is not my core skill set, if you’re expecting that I’m not your guy. But these are the things that I bring to the table. But I’m willing to also expand to other areas. And because I’m a typical startup guy at heart, I’m willing to learn these things. But all that said, you know, let me know what you think. Because you know, when you look at a startup there are there is one fundamental thing, you know, many times what happens is, because I’ve been a founder myself, I realized this, you know, there are certain people who can sound smart on an interview, but that does not translate into work. Right? So I was very clear from day one saying that this is who I am, and this is who I am not let’s let’s put things on the table very clearly and not set the wrong expectations. But then, because I have been from a startup background, I also know that I cannot say things that I’ll work only on these things and I won’t work on these things. You know, a startup is a place where you pretty much play every kind of role. You know, sometimes I’m probably demoing my product to somebody else. Sometimes I’m, you know, running my own ads, sometimes I’m creating content, or sometimes I’m speaking at a podcast and whatnot. And all of these things fall into place. Because at the end of the day, you know, what the vision is, and the vision that we spoke about, at the organization. So other there was like, here’s one fundamental thing, you know, what we are trying to do is today, we might be building this product tomorrow, it might be something else. But what we are trying to do is we are trying to, you know, go ahead and automate all the mundane low value tasks that people are not paid for, and augment with them on the high value tasks. Now, when you have that kind of a vision, you clearly know where you’re going. And then whatever step the company takes, you are going to be on board because it’s aligned. And the most important thing that I really, really loved. And that’s, that’s an important filter for me, wherever I go, is the value system that the company has. So to give you an example of the value system, what I mean by that is, everybody speaks about transparency, and, you know, certain values and all of that. But to give you an example, to have a pricing, clearly mentioned on your website is one sign of transparency. Another sign of transparency is that, you know, there are people who believe that, hey, it’s part of my research to go and mystery shop on my competitor and sign up for the product and see how that works. Fair enough, nothing wrong. But as a principle here, you know, the way we think at OMA is that is something that we will never do. Yes, if a customer comes in and says that, hey, I used XYZ product. And these are the things that we didn’t like, and we are going with your product, guess that information coming inside, as a feedback is welcome. But we going in and testing somebody’s product with a fake email is a no no for us. So values, like these are something that really, really interested me. And I’m like, this is the place I need to be

 

Scott D Clary  51:59

very smart. And, and just to, I want to make this hyper clear for people that are listening who have never used like a conversational intelligence tool. So like, at its core, what you’re doing, is it sitting on a Zoom meeting, for example, and it just transcribes absolutely everything, and then you’re taking insights out of that, but like for a woman in particular, that’s going a step further than just gone, which is like the sales conversation, it’s, it’s any conversation, and it’s based on the team.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  52:25

Yeah, and describe it this way. You know, I would say that every meeting, for example, has three parts to its entire lifecycle, you know, sort of things that you do before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting. So what we do before the meeting is sort of things like, say, for example, you have a set of templates to prepare, what you’re going to discuss in a particular call. So when I say templates, it’s not a verbatim script as to what I’m going to discuss. But say, if it’s a sales call, I’m going to have a set of things like, hey, I need to touch upon their pain points, I need to understand the problems that they’re trying to solve for, and then the company background a little bit. And you know, what stage or the, or the in terms of buying, let’s say, four or five things that you want to touch on that particular call. And then the advantages that you have is, you don’t need to prepare every single time, you know, once you have an agenda, like say, if it’s, if it’s going to be a job interview, I need to touch on these factors. If it’s this meeting, I touch one of these factors. And automatically those templates get applied to the call, or meeting based on the invite that you send, you know, if I’m going to send out a podcast interview, then that’s going to be a different template, which are we I sending out an invite for you to do a discovery call with me. Right. So that’s one and then there is the second part of automation that happens before the call is me sending you an automated announcement that this call will be recorded. That’s to comply with your GDPR CCPA. And, you know, all the compliances the recording laws around the world. And finally, there is also a reminder that goes one hour before the call, which helps you avoid any no shows that happens in the last minute. So you cannot completely avoid it. But you can minimize that. Then during the meeting, there is this part where the entire video call is recorded, then the transcription also happens in addition to transcription, there is this one page of summary notes that the AI automatically takes and updates to your CRM. And then the third part that is after the meeting is where this whole conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence comes into the picture wherein you can set up trackers to understand hey, how did somebody come into your, into your ecosystem? Or, you know, what are the different tools that they use? Or who were the people they compare you with? And what are the feature requests that they have? So you can set up anything that you want? And it’s based and the beauty is that when you say conversation does it’s what it means is it is not based on some attribution that you get from somewhere. It is actually what your customers say it’s captured from that conversation. And then, of course, there is the revenue diligence part where you understand that, hey, where a particular deal is in what stage of conversation, is it in? Is it in negotiation stage? You know, is it in security check, or is it just, you know, the demo is done, and it’s pending the next call, or whatever. And at any given point of time, when you go and see this dashboard, you realize that, hey, from this company, there are these three people involved. And from our side, there are these people involved. And the moment you understand that this is the stage where it’s getting stuck, you can bring in the right person to get that conversation to the other side, you know, to get deal closed, or whatever. And then there are these internal loops that you can have within the product as part of the workflow. What I mean by that is, let’s say, for example, our customer, there’s a customer support issue, and somebody comes in tells me, hey, you know, I was using this product, and this did not work, you know, there’s this issue, can you help me fix, now, instead of me taking a detailed note, and then filing a ticket in my help desk, and then asking it getting assigned to somebody and they are looking into that, what I can do is in that conversation, I can just select that part of the conversation, it becomes 22nd or 32nd, video snippet that I can drop to this engineer on Slack, and say that, hey, listen to this, this what the customer is saying can help fix that, you know, this saves me time from having yet another meeting and explaining them. But it’s asynchronous. At the same time, he gets the context, I get the context, and things are pretty much very quickly fixed. So yeah, there are multiple aspects of it. I don’t want to make this an almost a switch, per se. But yeah,

 

Scott D Clary  56:34

I was gonna say it’s like an incredible, it’s an incredible feedback mechanism. It’s an incredible feedback mechanism. Okay,

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  56:39

sorry. That is why, you know, when we position this, we stop calling ourselves conversation intelligence. Yeah, though, that’s the industry, we position ourselves as a meeting lifecycle assistant. And there is a reason to this, you know, when you have a product that is listening to your call, and some sometimes, you know, you can feel that, hey, this is some sort of a big brother kind of an effect that somebody is monitoring me all the time. But instead of thinking that, you know, when you say, it’s a lifecycle assistant, it’s there as your assistant, it’s taking notes for you, it’s updating things for you, it is helping you in your task. That is a whole different point of view that you’re giving, than saying that, hey, I’m monitoring your conversation and giving intelligence.

 

Scott D Clary  57:21

Very smart. Very, and how do you when you are creating a tool like this? Like, I know that there are obviously competitors in the market, and even you even named one previously that are building out competitive solutions. But what is the what is the marketing play? What is the main, you know, there’s all the regular traditional marketing items that you’re taking on between I’m sure content to social to SEO to everything in between. But when you build out something that could be relatively new for, say, an older executive in a large organization that’s never used anything like this before? How do you market it this still a blue ocean problem that you’re solving for? Is this an educational item? Is this something where you’re drawing parallels to existing feedback programs and showing sort of like efficacy and an optimization of those programs? What’s as you know, as marketing director, what’s the strategy for taking an early stage SaaS product to market?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  58:19

So generally, the way we look at it is, because it’s a it’s a horizontal solution, the way we look at it is, it’s it’s not, you know, you need not necessarily push it to somebody who doesn’t get it, the way it happens is, you know, we don’t call ICPs our ideal customer profile, you know, internally, we talk about it as initial customer profile. What we mean by that,

 

Scott D Clary  58:41

okay, like, it’s never heard that before, but sorry.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  58:45

Yeah, what I mean by that is, let’s say, for example, today, a salesperson starts using this, okay, and, you know, their, their team can start using it completely. And then what happens is over a period of time, Customer Success starts to feel that, hey, this is interesting, I can also use use this and, you know, maybe set up reminders and make sure that I do my regular check in calls and all of that. And then after looking at these people, then the engineering team thinks I can use this for my internal meetings, or maybe the user research guy thinks that, hey, I can record all my customer conversations to understand, you know, what’s, what’s the problem? And here’s the largest strategy right? So, what happens is, we look at ourselves as an all in one solution than a point solution. So when you look at say, let me give you an example. Say there is there is a, there has been a red ocean when you look at say typically project management tools or productivity tools, let’s say you have the asanas of the world, and you know, you have notion and then after amidst all these billion dollar companies, you had somebody like clickup, who came in much later, but the beauty of clickup is that they were very much horizontal solution like us. You know, that’s the reason that they grew. And even internally at oh, by the way, when we started using clickup, this was the beauty that we observed. Let’s say, initially, the engineering team was using JIRA, you know, for all their status meetings and whatever they are recording. And then the GDM team, the marketing and customer success, and you’re, as we were using Asana, and we didn’t know what was happening in their world, and they didn’t know what was happening here. And then there was no clear collaboration, except for those, you know, bi weekly sprint meetings or feedback meetings where we have as the entire team where we talk about, hey, what are we accomplished during the week, or during that sprint. And then once we got rid of these two tools, and brought in clickup, we realize that the entire organization can be on one single tool, yes, it’s not going to be the best of breed, where you’re not going to get all the things that you all the bells and whistles that you know you used to get. But the advantage of using something like this is that the maintenance is easy. The you know, you’re going to get visibility for the entire organization. And also fact of the matter is, any tool that you buy, as such, people are always going to be using about only 30% of it, or probably, you know, 30 to 40%. So the bells and whistles Anyway, don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that, you know, you don’t develop those features. Yes, every tool, you know, develops over a period of time. So that’s the logic that the token, we thought that he Yes, you know, there are some notetaking tools in the market where people take notes using that. But again, they have to update it into a CRM, or you know, they have to export it, have it in their system, and then upload into the CRM. And then there is a separate transcription tool, which people use to just get transcripts. And then there are these intelligence tools that people use separately to understand revenue, intelligence, and all of that. So instead of and then the thing is, instead of using 10, different tools for different parts of the product, like when you think about a meeting, you know, you have Google meet, you have your notes, you have your CRM, you have, you know, see from there, you might create a Trello board, like you might be using a set of 10 different tools in the entire process. But what if you could bring all of these things in one roof. And the change that we were trying to make through that is, you know, ensure that there is no context lost between, you know, moving things from one system to the other, making sure that no information is lost in thin hair. And once we got rid of all of these things, we realize that, hey, there is power to collaboration right here by bringing it in one tool. So that became our marketing message, you know, we said, all in one place, not all over the place. So that’s, that’s the impact that we started to make. So it started with one profile, and then expanded to the entire company. And it also directly contributed to our GTM, to say that you can land in one place and start expanding to this. And a beautiful way to explain this, even from a product perspective, you know, think of this as a triangle, wherein you have the bottom layer, which is the engineering layer, which is broad and adaptable to multiple requests that you will get and the way you need to expand. And from there, the second most layer on top is your product layer, which is focused on delivering and solving for a particular problem. And then the topmost layer, which is the sharpest layer is your go to market, which is going to be super focused at some point. But because you have breath at the bottom, you have the ability to expand and scale your product in the future, and your product marketing and your energy team can adapt towards that.

 

Scott D Clary  1:03:36

Amazing that was that’s that’s uh, okay, so that was a great way to sort of close up on on marketing in general and using a VM as a pot, like a perfect, perfect example of how to properly take a product that to market. So I appreciate that I wanted to, I always like to do a couple rapid fire at the end as well for me, so, so I didn’t mean to copy your format, but I also like doing the rapid fire stuff. Before I pivot, though. Any final thoughts on on the future of marketing on what you’re seeing with what you’ve done with BOMA and where you think marketing is going to be going to some sort of last, you know, last thoughts last lessons people that are listening, but then also, where do people connect with you? So all the social links, the websites, all of that?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  1:04:22

Right? So honestly, you know, I will not predict what’s going to happen with marketing because see, nobody predicted COVID We don’t know what’s gonna happen that structure to Yeah, and and the honesty is like, you know, any look at pretty much any prediction charts right. So, either people are talking about their wish list or you know, something that they reflect upon has as to what has happened in the past and extrapolate things from that. The best thing that we can do as a marketer is stay as open as possible and stay as nimble as possible to adapt whatever is coming. And if I have to pass on one key message as As a marketer is to say that never plan for more than a month, you know, yeah, it’s ideal to say that plan for a quarter plan for this plan for that, yes, you can have the broader plan, it needs to be, you know, a little adjustable. But at any given point of time, you can only plan until what you can see. And then you need to adapt when something is happening around you, you know, just see how you can make the most out of that. And where people can connect, the easiest place to find me is LinkedIn. So just type Y ag EOG. And you don’t even have to type my full name, you will be able to find me. And my full name yagni schweren.com. That’s my website. And the ATM conversations podcast is my podcast show. And you can also check out a BOMA. It’s a b o ma.com. And if you are a little bit curious about what Obama means it’s an acronym for a very organized meeting, Assistant.

 

Scott D Clary  1:05:56

Oh, smart. Very smart. I didn’t know that. That’s very, that’s good. Good. Okay, perfect. All right, let’s do a couple rapid fire. And then, and then we can close it out. So a couple questions, I’d like to go through biggest challenge that you’ve had in your personal or professional life, how did you overcome it? And what what did you learn from it?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  1:06:16

Great. So the biggest challenge I yeah, that was probably I think, a couple of times, it happened in my life. You know, I was chucked out of the company that I was working for a couple of times in my life. And it was a shock. Because you know, sometimes you put a lot of value on yourself when you think that you’re doing this. But you also realize that certain times, that’s not the best place where you were to be. And you also honest to yourself, you realize that I didn’t do the best. And the both times when I was chucked out, it was because I didn’t do the best that I could in that particular job, you know, I didn’t perform well. And to get into the next job between that I’m talking about this, you know, once that happened in 2013, and once in 2016. And both these times what happened was, you know, it took me about three months before I got into the next job. And that gave me a lot of time to look back and realize my priorities and the set of things that you know what I was doing right and what I wasn’t, and then it helped me to choose something that I’m 100% into, you know, it’s not about selling a product for people to buy, it’s about you buying into something first so that you do things in a way that is convincing to you. So that is why today I’m able to talk with so much conviction because I’m into a product that I’m working for, that I truly, truly believe in. And, you know, even if you wake me up in the middle of the night, I’ll be able to give you a good pitch. So that’s that’s something about it. And finally, another another thing that I can also talk to you about is I had a trek, in December 2021, I went to the Himalayas, wow, that tracks that for the very first time in my life. And as a person, I’m a bit scared of heights. And towards the end of the, you know, end of the summit, it was a ridge that was, you know, very narrow, and it was really, really scary. And I went on top of that, but living there for a week with people that I didn’t even know about I didn’t know of and you know, all these truckers we met as part of the community there. And then you know, we spent the week together. And one thing that I realized during that period is that as humans, the moment you have adversity, it brings out the actual compassion for humanity inside of you. And we lived a very minimalistic life at that point, you know, the entire one week there by just had one lunchbox and one water bottle. And I could live with that for an entire week. And I realized that, why can’t I bring this back to my life, you know, most of the things that I have around me is a luxury that I took for granted. And I have to look back and realize that there are lots of things that I’m blessed with and I should be thankful about it.

 

Scott D Clary  1:09:03

Very, very good. Okay. Next question. If you had to choose one person, obviously, there’s been many, but pick one person who’s had an incredible impact on your life. Who is that person? What did they teach you?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  1:09:13

Say God, without a doubt, and okay, good. Very good. Yeah, absolutely. And this is something I already told you, you know, the simplicity and that down to earth stuff without see the thing that why the reason I don’t think humility is because the moment you say you’re humble, you’re thinking that you want to be humble. But simplicity is that it’s who you are, you know, it you’re not trying to be humble, you’re that’s naturally him, you know, there are certain principles that he operates with, but at the same time, he keeps things in the first principles. He is very simple as a human. And that is something that I would like to emulate and, you know, for somebody who has accomplished what he has, and he being that, I think I can definitely take a leaf out of his life.

 

Scott D Clary  1:09:57

Amazing. A book podcast, something makes You’ve read or consume that you’d recommend people to check out.

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  1:10:03

Two podcasts I love the most one is the knowledge project by Shane Parrish, and then again, a big fan of the Tim Ferriss show as well. And especially his episodes with navall, Ravi Kant and episodes with Balaji Srinivasan, these are some of my favorite episodes that I would binge on at any given point of time.

 

Scott D Clary  1:10:23

Amazing. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing, what would it be?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  1:10:29

Um, have no regrets. If you want to try out something, just go and try. Don’t double think, just do.

 

Scott D Clary  1:10:38

Very good. Very good. Okay. And last question, what does success mean to you?

 

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh  1:10:44

Um, this is a very tough question to answer. But Success to me is, you know, basically, being happy with yourselves. You know, at the end of the day, it’s not materialistic success. It’s not what you learn or accomplish or anything. It’s about. If you can go back to bed every single day, thinking that you have not done any harm to anyone and to help at least one person or, you know, you, you have lived a good person for that particular day. That fundamentally is success. You know, at the end of the day, whatever contributes to your peace, that is what success is all about.

 

1:11:35

I’m Amira, Rose Davis, host of the new season of American prodigy all about black girls in gymnastics. My white coaches just said you may not get the scores that you deserve because you’re black is the story of a decades long struggle of black gymnasts trying to find and amplify their voices.

 

1:11:53

I can’t be the next mobiles. I can’t be the next Dominique Dawes. I can only be the next version of myself.

 

1:11:59

Listen to American prodigies on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and wherever you get your podcasts